Greek and Roman Historians: Information and Misinformation

by Michael Grant

It is today widely accepted that we do not get the whole truth from any historian. Greek and Roman Historians considers the work of ancient historians such as Herotudus, Tacitus and Thucydides in the the light of this attitude. In an enlightening new study, Michael Grant argues that misinformation, even deliberate disinformation, is abundant in their writings.
Grant, one of the world's greatest writers of ancient history, suggests new ways of reading and interpreting the ancient historians which maximise their usefulness as source material. He demonstrates how the evidence they provide can be augmented by the use of other, literary and non-literary, sources.
Greek and Roman Historians shows us how we can use written history to learn about the ancient world, even if our conclusions are not those its historians intended. The author argues that their work remains our most important source of information, once we have learned to question and incorporate their imperfect regard for the truth.
Grant's account is an indispensible guide to the sources and their interpretation for all students of ancient history.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Ancient History, Roman, Greece, Roman History, Italy

188 pages, Hardcover

First published April 13, 1995

About the author

Michael Grant was an English classisist, numismatist, and author of numerous popular books on ancient history. His 1956 translation of Tacitus’s Annals of Imperial Rome remains a standard of the work. He once described himself as "one of the very few freelances in the field of ancient history: a rare phenomenon". As a popularizer, his hallmarks were his prolific output and his unwillingness to oversimplify or talk down to his readership.

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

Reviews

[Olethros · Rating 4 out of 5]

-Análisis de discrepancias con espíritu reivindicativo.-

Género. Ensayo.

Lo que nos cuenta. Apasionada defensa del estudio de la historia de Grecia y Roma mediante el análisis comparativo de sus historiadores contemporáneos, sus estilos, métodos y recursos.

¿Quiere saber más de este libro, sin spoilers? Visite:

http://librosdeolethros.blogspot.com/...

[Ed · Rating 3 out of 5]

In “Greek and Roman Historians” Michael Grant sets a difficult task for himself, to accept that classical histories are full of misinformation and deliberate distortions, try and identify what they are and why they occur and still find a method for reading them that allows them to be used as source material. In a way it is not unlike the approach one takes to any history; we realize that the material the author used, what was emphasized, what left out and what interpreted in light of the his political, economic and social interests doesn’t invalidate the work. Often we discover something about the subject matter of the history even if it isn’t what the author intended and just as often are able to learn what contemporaries of the historian felt about their world as illustrated by how they see events described by the historian.

One challenge is point of view of the writer and his attempt to show how important, resourceful or intelligent he was. The memoirs of Ulysses Grant and William Sherman from the American Civil War are different from each other in emphasis, detail and tone—and they were on the same side. Contemporaneous books from the South, “Memoirs of Robert E. Lee: His Military and Personal History” written in 1888 or ” From Manassas to Appomattox” by General James Longstreet will be even more divergent.

But these are challenges faced by all analysts of written history. Missing from the ancient historians is the essential element of the historian—written sources so that we can consult the same material used by (for example) Herodotus or Thucydides. They weren’t there for the Greeks, they weren’t there for the Romans and the certainly aren’t available to 21st century critics. Grant addresses this conundrum by going back to the time when the histories were written, when history was a literary art in the same category as epic poetry and tragedy. Herodotus saw himself as a creative heir of Homer and the Persian wars he chronicled as directly descended from the Trojan War. Thucydides claimed to reject the Homeric traditions but mainly cut out the most outlandish of the myths and obvious exaggerations but he named Minos and Agamemnon as real persons, creating the early history of Greece out of mythology. The Roman historians had their own foundation myth. Livy, Tacitus and Plutarch considered Theseus and Romulus as historical figures and used much of Homer (later Virgil) to frame the early history of Rome. And all of them were more interested in truth than accuracy.

Which is not to say that they can be ignored as sources for studying the ancient world since much of what these historians wrote is buttressed by evidence from non-literary sources such as temple inscriptions, coins and grave goods. Archeology in the Mediterranean and ancient history of Greece and Rome are often complementary.

People of my age, gender and religion were required to take two years, if not more, of Latin in high school and were encouraged to study Greek. One of the second year texts was “Commentaries on the Gallic Wars” by Julius Caesar, which we translated into English and then attempted to translate back to Latin. Even given the drudgery of brute force memorization of noun declensions and verb conjugations the power and (occasionally) beauty of Caesar’s prose came through. It is their artistic merit as much as their historical accuracy that keeps these works alive.

[Sanjay Prabhakar · Rating 1 out of 5]

It's not clear to me why this book was written. The target audience is apparently someone who is utterly credulous about ancient historians. For others, it is mostly useless, the most useful part probably being the list of lost sources.

The bulk of the book is a list of comments on how ancient historians failed to live up to the standards of modern history, never approaching serious analysis, and pervaded by a dull and stingy positivism to the degree that it feels like Grant feels genuine disdain for his subjects. He assures us in the introduction that there are nevertheless three reasons why the ancient historians are worth reading: they are crucial sources despite their failings as histories; literary value; they are instructive in the way they fail as histories. None of these is really explored, and if he is trying to make the case that we should read them, he has done a poor job. The pointlessness of the endeavour is transparent at the end of the (tellingly brief) chapter "Should We Read the Ancient Historians?" Grant quotes Woodman - "only when literary analysis has been carried out can we begin to use these texts as evidence for history" - and graces us with the platitude that "The glory of the ancient historians is unrelated to any particular age, because it is timeless. We must read them because of the wonderful and influential literature that they wrote." Well, there has been no literary analysis, nor exposition of the historians' literary merit. What then has been the point? The most frustrating thing of all is that, having established that we cannot read the ancient historians as we would read a modern historian, there is no attempt to ask the obvious question that follows: do they yet have some sui generis merit as historians, beyond mere prose styling? Had he asked, and tried to provide some answers to this question, Grant may have managed to write a book that was moderately interesting and enjoyable to read.

In sum, a rubbish book.

[Stephen Sorensen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think this is a good book for beginners who are interested in learning about the mistakes and lies made by ancient Greek and Roman historians.

“…it remains true that the ancient historians did make mistakes and rather too many of them. Some of these mistakes were accidental … Others are deliberate … and are therefore disinformation.” p.83

[Iwan Berry · Rating 3 out of 5]

This offers up a good introductory overview of the pitfalls of some well-known ancient historians, such as Herodotus, Tacitus, Polybius and Thucydides. Grant's quite well-served in his takedown of said sources, positioning them as good literary writers and moralists rather than outright reliable historians.

[Stephen Bedard · Rating 4 out of 5]

People ay "Ancient historians say" but how did they write and who was who? This book gives great context to Greek and Roman historians and provides a framework for understanding ancient history writing in general.

[Andrew · Rating 2 out of 5]

Grant was a prolific and popular ancient historian who has tackled in this text some serious questions; are the ancient Greek and Roman historians actually worthy of reading, how reliable are they and what is their relationship with modern historiography? To some extent he succeeds in providing responses to these and other questions. Yet it doesn't quite meet one's expectations and ultimately reads as a somewhat simplistic study.

Anyone who studies ancient history is aware that our extant literary sources are highly problematic. Whether one considers the intention of the works, the writers' attitudes to historical truth, the undoubted errors that exist and their overarching relevance to contempory academiia, the writings of Herodotus, Thucydides, Tacitus, Plutarch and others are highly problematic. Grant does a very good job of speaking to these issues, and his commentary on those ancient historians and biographers is for the most part spot on. Grant makes it abundantly clear that one cannot judge the ancient Greek and Roman sources on the same grounds as we would assess modern historians. He is detailed and emphatic in describing how and where and why the classical authors are in effect non-historical.

However where Grant falls down is in two areas. Firstly, he doesn't successfully argue why one should still consider studying the likes of Thucydides and Livy, particularly in the context of ancient history. More modern classicists and historians would speak to what these writers represented as part of a historical and cultural context, not so much as to what they record for posterity. Grant does a fine job of tackling the absence of historicity in these authors' work, but he doesn't really find them a new place in our understanding of the ancient Mediterranean.

A second criticism that can be made of Grant's book is that he offers plenty of evidence and authorities to help argue his arguments as to the each of the authors, however almost every time he includes a quote he fails to provide the source citation where it is placed. It is most frustrating to read quote after quote as to what an expert thinks of Ammianus or Sallust, with no details as to who Grant s referring to. One has to go back to the notes in the rear of his book for most of these quotes, and this is not helpful. This is (one assumes) an editorial decision, and it is wrong.

There are some other issues with the book. Grant is both too broad and too narrow in his apporach. He picks a dozen ancient Graeco-Roman historians and whilst this is a broadly appropriate selection, sometimes he says almost nothing about these authors. Xenophon, Caesar and Ammianus get little attention contracsted with Herodotus, Thucydides, Livy and Tacitus. It might've been better for Grant if he used less historians for his study and was more focused on their representative challenges.

It's also surprising that Grant really doesn't do enough to confront to problem of textual transmission. Aside from comments about what gaps there are in his select historians, or the 'lost' historians that get a chapter at the end, he says almost nothing about how fragile the transmission of classical authors have been.

All up this is a very adequate book that will be informative to those new to the study or reading of the major ancient historians. It is a reasonable attempt to ask and answer a lot of important questions that impact upon our understanding and use of these historians. Yet it doesn't quite meet expectations, and for anyone with more than an elementary knowledge of ancient historiography it will be a disappointment.

[Michael Anderson · Rating 3 out of 5]

A historian's critique of Greek and Roman historians.